Looming sequester exposes GOP rift

Commentary: You can’t govern with abstract principles

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Almost everyone agrees the impending sequester on March 1, which would lead to $44 billion in federal spending cuts in this fiscal year (and more to come later), would hurt the economy and slow the recovery. Several hundred thousand people could lose their jobs. It would also reduce services that a lot of people rely on. It’ll make us worse off. It’s terrible policy.

The impact of the sequester on the Republican Party is less certain.

Opinion: Why Republicans should support sequester

(4:49)

Columnist Kim Strassel on President Obama's remarks urging a delay of sequester.

Most politicians have more success at a high level of abstraction. It’s easy to talk in general terms about an Axis of Evil, or the Sanctity of Life, or Fiscal Responsibility. But eventually, if you want to govern, you have to get into the messy details, details that often expose internal contradictions and require uncomfortable trade-offs.

The GOP can maintain party unity only by keeping the discussion at an abstract level.

The Republicans hold contradictory views on budget deficits, taxes, federal priorities, and economic growth. Party leaders say they fervently believe that federal spending must be reduced, they say they believe that taxes must never go up, they say they believe that the government has no greater purpose than ensuring the national security, and they say they believe the economy must grow faster.

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According to Macroeconomic Advisers, the sequester will reduce civilian employment by about 600,000 over the next two years. That’s in addition to cuts in uniformed servicemen and -women.

The sequester starkly exposes the contradictions in those abstract principles, for it is impossible to accomplish all four. Even doing three is a stretch.

Because the GOP is split between a tea-party faction that won’t back down on its principles and an establishment faction that is afraid to, the Republicans have been unwilling to prioritize — that is to say, compromise.

So the sequester will do the prioritizing for them. The sequester — the automatic, indiscriminate spending reductions — will do a bit to reduce spending, and it will keep tax rates from rising, promoting two of the Republicans’ aims.

But the sequester goes against two other Republican goals: national security and economic growth.

This is an odd outcome, because if you asked most politicians and most voters — Democrats and Republicans alike — they’d say that national security and economic growth are the two most important things government can do.

That’s what happens when a party is unwilling to come to terms with its own internal disagreements.

Of course, the Democrats own the sequester as well. The Democrats are willing to allow what they acknowledge is a bad policy to become law.

But the automatic cuts don’t expose inherent contradictions in the Democratic Party in the same way they do for Republicans, because the Democrats have been able to articulate their priorities. That is to say, they’ve proposed compromises that most members of the party can live with, including putting cuts in entitlement programs on the table.

Not everyone likes those proposals (I certainly don’t), but the party is at least talking about the details, not just the abstract principles of Fair Taxes and Protect the Innocent.

The sequester is not anyone’s preferred outcome. But it’s likely to happen anyway because the Republicans would rather have arbitrary and indiscriminate spending cuts, even at the Pentagon, than expose the divisions in their party.

For the Democrats, the path is less complicated. They don’t want the sequester, but they know that it is likely to hurt the Republicans politically. If you can’t have good policies, at least you can score political points.

It would be much better if we could adopt policies that do more good than harm, but that’s impossible with the Congress we now have.

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